Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday April 30, 2012 @11:21AM
from the do-not-surf-list dept.

Barence writes "Five of Britain's biggest ISPs have been ordered to block access to The Pirate Bay. Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media have been told to block access to the site. Britain's biggest ISP, BT, has been given a few further weeks to 'consider its position.' Music lobby group, the BPI, welcomed the move, saying music creators 'deserve to be paid for their work just like everyone else' and calling for those who use The Pirate Bay to illegally download content to 'explore the many digital music services operating ethically and legally in the UK.'"

Here in the Netherlands we have and IP-level block for some ISPs (Ziggo, the biggest, and XS4ALL, the internet-friendliest). However, research has already shown that this has not reduced piracy through the pirate bay (oddly enough, you'd expect at least one or two people to move on to the next website when 'it doesn't work').

The ISPs will very likely take the least-cost, least-effective method available to them under the terms of the court order so as to adhere to it with a minimum of disruption to their profits and their users.

Indeed. We need a name for the situation in which a company does something beneficial not for any altruistic or ethical reasons, but simply because the most profitable path happens to be aligned with the interests of the users.

Indeed. We need a name for the situation in which a company does something beneficial not for any altruistic or ethical reasons, but simply because the most profitable path happens to be aligned with the interests of the users.

Pretty much all the ISPs have a very effective content filter originally instated in the name of blocking child porn - it uses a transparent proxy to intercept and block requests at the HTTP level - and I think it's that specifically that they've been ordered to use to block The Pirate Bay. At the time, the ISPs and politicians behind this scheme insisted that it was only targetted at child porn and there wasn't any kind of slippery slope, whilst opponents pointed out that the courts could force them to block other kinds of sites once they had the infrastructure in place.

This probably won't work in the UK. All the major ISPs have some variant of BT's Cleanfeed censorship system [wikipedia.org] - they were pressured into installing it in the name of stopping child porn - so they're almost certainly going to be blocking at the IP level. The entire point of this court case was to force ISPs to use their very effective existing censorship infrastructure to block sites like The Pirate Bay.

That won't stop DNS functionality, from looking at this [wikipedia.org]. You can use a proxy (or use SSL) to get around the cleanfeed - you just need to know where you are connecting first (and DNS does that job). Note that cleanfeed works by intercepting your request and examining the URL - well, that can only be done by reading an HTTP packet. Can't do that through SSL, or even by using an open proxy (since the "suspect" IP would not be used, and so wouldn't trigger this whole process).

So: the lessons are! 1: Use your own resolver, if you can't trust a public one. 2: use SSL you damn idiots, stop letting data fly around cleartext! (this last one is a yell at the people hosting the sites, not you poor users)

Keeping a child rapist from moving next to a school to victimize the children seems like both a noble goal and easy to implement and with only good consequences. (*)

Only now you've empowered government to decide where you can live. Where you live is a revokable privilege, not a right.

That will only be used against those monsters, right? right? Good people have NOTHING to worry about.

WRONG.

Las Vegas bans even misdemeanor drug offenders from even entering a major portion of the city.

Google "order out corridor". OOPS!

Precedents are a dangerous thing.

Creating infrastructure is a dangerous thing too.

Onstar can be used by the government to listen to your conversations and even to disable your car, by making it think it is stolen - it will refuse to start.

(*) Life without parole for the real monsters would eliminate the need for this stuff AND protect the children!Or a 38 cent bullet.

But they don't want to protect the children, they want to control society with an iron fist. Letting molestors out of prison makes people fearful and then they pass these laws, and get precedents, and eventually you have weed heads being banned from huge parts of the city (ironically the Las Vegas order out corridor is so big - drug offenders are more restricted than molestors! Then again, molestation makes the politicans stronger, and drugs reduce their power.)

TBP doesn't tun the trackers any more, but even if they did, the rumor around here seems to be that Cleanfeed - the child-porn-blocking system - will be repurposed. Cleanfeed only filters http content on port 80.

We've done the DNS block thing in Belgium, which makes sense because it's a prefect example of the "belgian solution" which is where you basically do not modify the status quo in any meaningful way and everyone loses a little but can spin it as a win. In this case :- Government doesn't really block anything, but can claim to be making an effort.- Copyright organizations don't curb piracy, but get to claim they've blocked a major site.- ISP's have to waste time on BS DNS blocking, but can claim to be law-abiding good citizens.- Customers have to use workarounds, but can feel like they're outsmarting "the man."

And TPB has legitimate purposes. I've watched several free movies like Pioneer One and The Yes Men Fix the World, as well as free music like Blalock's IRP, an album from an artist named Sosa that I've never heard of before, and all kinds of things.

Don't get me wrong, that's a small minority of the links up there (since it doesn't host any files, duh) but it's not all links to pirated material.

I have had no success with google's filetype search at all recently. it used to work well, but any time I use "filetype" now it just seems to ignore it (of course it generally ignores most of the explicit instructions I give it anyway, so maybe that's just the new google...

They think they are punishing TPB by blocking it, and that other torrent sites will be afraid because of the example they make of TPB. It is the sort of thinking that comes from politicians who grew up in a pre-Internet age.

There will come a time, friend, when you will cringe upon looking back at this statement. Sometime in the near future we will see the Internet blocked and an unblocked address will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and only be available to corporations with very deep pockets. Right now we are on the cusp where individual sites are being blocked, but soon it will be more efficient simply to block everything and unblock "safe" sites.

Do the BPI members use the same Hollywood accounting methodology to pay their contracted artists, like charging "breakage" against digital music download sales? If so then the BPI concern over the artists getting paid is hypocritically laughable.

"explore the many digital music services operating ethically and legally in the UK.'"

Yes, and you "can have any color of model T, as long as its black." Please. The popularity of the pirate bay suggests that the 'many digital music services' are woefully lacking in something the pirate bay provides; And study after study have shown that it's not the price that's driving people to those sites, but the ease of use and lack of DRM. People are, in fact, willing to pay to be entertained... they just don't believe that the pricing model accurately reflects the entertainment value of the product -- and when every song is priced the same at the various digitla music stores, that's pretty good evidence they're right; Nobody would say that Manos, Hands of Fate is of equal value to say, The Dark Knight. Well, nobody except the entertainment industry...

Music lobby group, the BPI, welcomed the move, saying music creators 'deserve to be paid for their work just like everyone else'

I agree. It's just unfortunate that when you buy mainstream music only a very tiny percentage goes to the music creators. Most of it goes to record label fat cats and towards lobbying for shit like this ban.

It certainly would be nice for some of these billion dollar infringement judgements to go to the music creators. But they probably stood to lose a few dollars. (assuming they ever got out of the hole with the record label they signed on with) Shows just how screwed up the economics of this issue is, on both ends of the line.

Here's an interview where a band told people NOT to bu their CDs, because they get nothing out of such sales. Instead they ask their fans to acquire their music through the net (torrent), and to support them through concert sales.

I tried freenet, and my impression was the same as yours. The basic problem is that there aren't enough people on it to make it fast and full of content, but nobody will be on it until it is...I also thought about TOR, but I don't like the idea that someone else pops out of the TOR network on to the public internet through my connection. It leaves me liable for their dirty deeds (I'd love to think that the simple fact that you can't know who it is would help, but I know that law enforcement would at the bar

It's not changed much. You can get a few good things piratewise (Someone uploads all the FiM episodes), but compared to any more mainstream network the library is pathetic. It's a place for the paranoid.

I like the idea of a mesh network, but you see the problem. There isn't much demand for such a thing because the existing internet already does the job very well. Even pirates have no problems hideing things. Unless you're an activist in a politically oppressive regime (A very small population) there just i

It was nice knowing the internet. Now the wicked people have figured out how to pervert it we can kiss it goodbye.

Internet: "Rumors of my demise have been greatly exagerated."

Think "whack-a-mole", and maybe you ought to read Fahrenheit 451. All the MafiAA are succeeding in doing is driving the pirates further out of their reach. Even unsophisticated users know they can get onto web forums and search engines to find answers to boneheaded moves like this.

Politicians get campaign financing, artists learn to publish and promote their own works independent of the labels, the law gets even more screwed up than it already i

As a British citizen I am getting more and more sick of the incompetent morons who govern this country.

Maybe instead of takings bribes from the likes of Rupert Murdoch, outmoded business like the recording industry and the fundamentally failed banking sector they could do some of the following:- Financial transaction taxes. Stop the crazy gambling in the financial sector- How about cutting fuel taxes (paid for by a 1% increase in corporation tax.) Everyone needs stuff moved around so making it cheaper can only be a good thing.- Invest in actual industry rather than bailing out the failed financial sector. You've spent hundreds of billions on this and have nothing to show for it.- Build fucking nuclear power stations. Solar, wind, wave, etc are completely impractical so stop wasting money on them- Stop wasting money on wars- Open up the government and stop fucking with your people

I'm not even sure who is worth voting for anymore. The Conservatives are as corrupt and sleazy as they were under Thatcher, Labour offer nothing more than "we wouldn't do what the Conservatives are doing but we won't bother to offer any ideas of our own" and the Liberal Democrats have sold themselves out to the Conservatives. Not one of these parties is willing to take any risks or do anything that requires telling the banking sector "NO!" The political class in the UK is completely rotten.

You cannot block the piratebay because it's an idea. You can take away its domain and block its IP addresses but those are things that can be changed. The piratebay will live on because it's an idea. It cannot be suppressed by the authorities. It will always resurface.

Posted this on the Guardian site but no reply so thought I'd ask here. As far as I know this ruling is only applicable in England and Wales as Scotland and Northern Ireland, while part of the UK has their own legal system. So therefore the block should not apply to customers in Scotland and Northern Ireland? I'm sure it would be easier for the ISPs to attempt a blanket block for a technical point of view but if so could their Scottish and Northern Irish customers have grounds to complain?

These court ordered blockades are simply seen by the network as damage that the network was designed to be able to work around. If Paul Baran [rand.org] hadn't spearheaded this effort at RAND the original AT&T would most likely still own America with its central office.

.... why the hell should it?
Let's just compare Linux to the closest thing there is to it on the Consumer space: OS X.
OS X, like Linux shares a lot of DNA with UNIX. But who would imagine giving a UNIX computer to their mother, their grandmother, their tech-challenged brother.
The people who think that Linux should be taking the world by storm I notice are all gear-heads with presumably a fair high level of technical competence. And that's the problem. Does anyone in their right mind think that any dist

It has been said that adversity breeds tougher organisms. The same holds true for TPB, because the whole concept of a centralized index for BitTorrent was already a step backwards compared to e2dk-like searches. Even with the Pirate Bay moving to magnet links, it was still a centralized index. So it was only a matter of time until the powers that be would choke that single point of failure to death. Expect the same to happen to all those cyberlocker sites: there ain't so many of them after all, and the MAFIAA can and eventually will fight them tooth and nail until they fold.

The more pressure is being put on those highly visible sites, the sooner truly distributed anonymous censorship-resistant and highly resilient p2p systems would not only emerge, but gain widespread adoption. And the more legitimate mainstream sites start appearing on those p2p networks as well, the more those networks will become indispensable and necessary part of everybody's infrastructure. THEN, and only then, governments won't be able to outlaw anon p2p, and we will have won this war, against all odds and against formidable opponents with seemingly unlimited resources. That would be the victory of the free human spirit.

Or, to put in another way: we've grown too lazy by sticking to existing, but highly vulnerable file sharing mechanisms. Only effective pressure from the MAFIAA will help us move forward towards next generation better and more robust architectures. Maybe these Copyright Taliban are doing us a favor, by forcing us to develop and migrate towards a communication system that will be truly uncensorable and that will be our main channel for free speech in the not so distant future.

I've taken to hanging around HMV and tutting disapprovingly when I see anyone take a CD to the check-out. Don't they realise that money is going to fund a terrorist organization that seeks to censor the proletariat?